Skill-Building Series: Emotion in Game Design (A UX Perspective)

[Music] good morning thank you for coming my name is emma kidball i'll be moderating the session on behalf of celia if you have any questions you can type them into the chat box next to the session video where i'll fail them to celia pending if you have time for questions uh celia i'm going to hand it off to you thank you emma hi everyone i'm i'm happy to be here at gdc summer and i hope that everybody is doing well as well as your loved ones so my name is sylvia huden and i have a phd in psychology and i've been working in the video game industry uh over 12 years now i've worked at ubisoft i worked at lucasarts and i worked at epic games i was director of ux at epic at the studio level and i worked on unreal engine i worked on a bunch of games and i worked very closely with the fortnight team i left epic in october 2017 and ever

since then i i'm a independent consultant and so i help a lot of companies like triple companies smaller companies to develop their ux mindsets and to develop processes and and train people and all that so this approach of emotion is going to be through the lens of ux my framework for ux is to break it down into two big pillars so you have usability and engage ability when you try to anticipate problems from happening in your game and you try to you know improve things there are two big lenses um usability is the ability of the game to be used so it's more about the functionality are people understanding what to do can they accomplish the objectives they need to accomplish like if they need to craft in your game can they understand how to craft so that's the usability part and a game

can be usable but boring it's not because the game is going to be easy to understand and you need to use that it's going to make it engaging so we also need to look into engageability especially especially for video games because the whole point of interacting with a system and when you play a game is to have fun and be engaged and to interact with the system so engage ability as um more around stuff like motivation emotion and game flow so this is a framework that i've been using to tackle problems like ux issues so that we can understand where to come from and then we can um fix them i did a bunch of gdc presentations on the topic uh they are called the gamer's brain and part one part two part three so you can just go back in and see that if you're interested and you haven't seen it um before but here we gonna tackle emotion in this um of in this framework and uh again through the lens of ux and and and by

understanding what's the science behind it and how we can use it to improve the user experience of a game so there's gonna be three big parts in this uh presentation we're gonna start with the science of emotion i'm not gonna go super deep uh of course but it's not it's just for you to have a a broader understanding of of uh you know what's the uh what's going on in the brain when we have emotions and then we're gonna talk about um the ux framework to use emotion in in game design and lastly we're gonna touch um on ethics considerations of course there's a lot of stuff to say around uh emotion in 45 40 45 minutes i really don't have that time to talk about many things so the idea is just to give you like an overview and during the questions i can also dive deeper into some elements so the uh limbic system is

what is thought uh to be responsible for emotion in in the human brain uh there is a broad consensus around it in science but it's not completely clear there are some scientists that actually don't agree that there is such a thing as the limbic system but for the sake of simplicity here let's say that there is some sort of consensus around this and so the limbic system it's um a lot of uh parts in the brain that take part um that are in in in this system you can see here just a few of them and these ones are very deep down the brain so on the thalamus hypothalamus hippocampus and amygdala the frontal lobe is as more uh the on the the cortex area and um the hippocampus is an interesting part of the ring because we know that it's also taking part into memory into souvenirs

and the amygdala is oftentimes the the part of the brain that we mention when we talk about uh emotion and and and fight or flight uh responses so it's just to for you to have like a a big um um overview of what we what we call the olympic system and so usually when we talk about emotion is to say that it's guiding our behavior we need to survive in this world and so we seek pleasure and we avoid pain this is how we can uh find food and uh and mate and care and uh carry on with our genes and avoid uh getting killed getting hurt so overall emotion is very good for that if we try something it's pleasurable we're going to remember that we're going to do it again uh so we do need to remember that and that's uh typically like the amygdala and the hippocampus

is helping us uh do that and of course if we're experiencing something and it's it's having a bad outcome this is where um we remember not to do this again so it's really important to have these emotions so it can uh guide us through um our lives oops sorry um so we learn to recognize and avoid unpleasant situations so here's an example if you've been if you've experienced being bitten by a dog you will remember that and we learn some some elements there are some there's a very uh uh natural i would say but some that we learn and we can reduce that in video games and and of course artists do that very well for example if you see an enemy that has very sharp teeth like here in um in mario you don't need to really experience what's gonna happen when you

get close to it you understand that this is an enemy that it is dangerous uh and that you should avoid it otherwise you are gonna probably get hurt so through emotions that sort of emotions we can guide our players to understand what's what's a a good outcome and what's probably dangerous that's pretty basic but a lot of people misunderstand conditioning a little bit there's a lot of um uh conditioning has a band named today and uh sure enough when we think about conditioning we think about the skinner box and we think about the experiments that um he did with um mostly with rats and with pigeons and they had to um to tap or to press on a pedal for example when there was a light lining up to get food but they also need to learn to press a pedal or to not press the a certain pedal to avoid getting electrical shocks so this is what conditioning is about

you learn to um this is more specifically operant conditioning so you see a a stimulus you need to do a certain action so press the pedal for example in order to either get a a reward or to avoid a punishment this is something that we use in our lives all the time if you think about shaking hands for example we've been conditioned to every time you see someone like uh during this gesture like uh raising out to uh reach out to your hand we have been conditioned to do the same because this is a social construct and we need to do that today we can't do this anymore and so we have to repress that that movement uh now now today we we got used to it but for a moment it was hard to uh at the very beginning of the pandemic it was really hard to repress ourselves to shake hands and that happened to me very often and um that's because we've been conditioned um to do that and so in that case we need

to relearn because uh we have like for example people if uh i try to reach out to han and i and i see that you're looking at me like no i mean we need to be careful this is a uh can be um interpreted as a negative outcome and because social um relatedness and and social elements are really important for humans we're going to react uh we're going to change our uh our pattern to react to this to have a better more adapted response so this is what conditioning is about it's about uh learning to repeat uh certain actions uh that lead to pleasurable outcomes and to avoid certain actions that lead to non-federal outcomes or dangerous ones i'm gonna make you listen to um this sound effect so be careful i should not be too loud but i'm just like if you have uh headphones just be careful

uh this is a sound coming up so listen to the sound [Music] i didn't hear anything i don't know if you uh heard the sound in there i hope you did i didn't know if i had feedback on that um so this was the sound from metal gear solid so if people have played metal gear solid this is a sound that is very recognizable and that you've been conditioned to react to whenever you hear it because you know that it's the sound that we hear whenever there are enemies around that are about to spot you so you've been conditioned to either hide very quickly or go into the open and shoot at everybody so this is an example of conditioning that is pretty powerful in a video game because it can guide us and it's also creating some some emotional harassments of course it's raising your awareness because we

know that there is danger around because this particular stimulus has been tied to danger so that's an example of how we uh we can use emotions in games and use conditioning uh and not in a way that is uh gonna be uh uh tricky we're gonna talk about dark patterns and and uh uh and emotions um that trigger uh uh not so good uh um creates some manipulation is not so good but uh conditioning is very important in our lives and this is a very efficient way to learn uh for example another example of real life is you've been conditioned if you start driving and you forgot to fasten your seatbelt then your car is going to beep and we react to that because it's super annoying by fastening up um our seat belt this is the uh restaurants that we've been conditioned to do so that the the annoying beeping stops so emotion guides our cognition and this

idea that we need to be emotionless to reason appropriately is not um true you have the same neural networks that um take that take part into emotion also take part into reasoning and so cognition and uh emotion work together we need emotions to be able to uh to have an adaptive response to our world music is a very particular and uh um and uh our brain because we have a very special response to uh music for um some reason so it uh it's one of the most rewarding and pleasurable experience for humans and it's um modulating it can modify activity in a very um um in the regions or associated to primary brain forces uh such as uh food or sex so it's it's

particularly powerful and that's the reason why we can have goosebumps uh or we can cry when we listen to certain music is it is particularly powerful in humans and so of course we should use that in video games when you have games like i know that on the on mobile a lot of people um turn the sound off so it's of course creating some constraints but uh in the other games it's really important to polish the sound design and the music but without forgetting about accessibility and players who have hearing impairments who are deaf so that they are also taken into account so emotion guides our behavior but what's interesting it's um it's also influenced by our cognition so we saw that emotion is is is uh

making us do stuff that we're going to interpret later on so emotion guys our cognition uh but also our cognition is influencing our uh emotion then i'm going to take an example uh i'm french so take an example with a bottle of a champagne a fine bottle of champagne if you have two bottles of champagne like one is this one is don perennium so if you know about champagne you know it's a very expensive brand of champagne and the bottle looks really really nice it's really appealing and let's say you have another bottle of champagne it's like a blast plastic bottle and it looks super cheap and we ask you to try the champagne from both of these bottles most people are going to have a tendency to think that to feel that the champagne coming from a nice uh the very fine bottle tastes better than the one from the plastic bottle but of course it's the same champagne and so this is how our cognition our expectations is changing

actually how we feel about things this is what we call appraisal we judge of situations based on what we know based on our culture based on social constructs and so this is in impacting our conscious feeling um of of things so that's appraisal and uh that's really important to to understand because uh uh we know that our perception is subjective it's it's uh it can be cultural based and so this is gonna have a an impact on how we feel about uh things about arts um and so we need to take that into account so that's appraisal you also have a reappraisal so reappraisal is when you have some bad emotion like some negative emotion happening let's say you just uh lost a game um and reappraisal is when you try to get over it and it could be seen as a thing that the glass half full instead of half empty now here's an example

in in a multiplayer game overwatch so an old screenshot where they do that pretty well so in any multiplayer game that is competitive you're always going to have some players they're going to have some negative emotions because they lost and so it's going to be important to help them reappraise the situation and so here's the the screen that you would see when you wear on the um on the victorious team so for those who don't know overwatch is a game you play six versus six um and and this is what you would see when you win so you have badges and your xp is going up and it's all so great when you're on the defeated team you actually so you have the feedback that you lost but they don't insist on how crappy you are to uh have lost it's not like oh you you suck you you lost they tell you that uh you are defeated but they try to help

you reappraise the situation by showing you how you got better against your own stats so they don't emphasize how you compare to other players because uh it's very likely that we're not on top of the chart um in the six versus game there's our one player that's on top of the the scoreboard and the all others are not um but if you compare people to their own stats it is very likely that we're gonna get better uh because we played more and so we as we practice the game we are very likely to progress and that's a that is a very good feeling uh so one of the elements that i showed you from the framework that i'm using in motivation is intrinsic motivation one part of this is competence we need to feel competent in an activity to be motivated to keep playing that keep doing that activity and so in a game where there's a lot of competence going on it's really important to see ourselves progressing so if it's a skill based game

um and we practice we are likely to get better and so if you um emphasize how the player is getting better against their own stats it's uh it's helping them reappraise the fact that they lost so this is an example of how by understanding a little bit better how emotion is is working you can uh you can help um uh creating a uh designing for some experiences that are gonna be more pleasurable uh emotionally suppliers so that's the the the to sum up this part emotion guides our behavior and cognition and cognition in return influences our emotions so now we're going to talk about emotion in game design and to talk about this we're going to start by talking about emotion in and design so don norman is a ux designer and an alcoholic scientist and he's the one who coined the term ux

back in the 90s so he's is like the father of the ux mindset and he has a book called emotional design where he explains a little bit the three levels of processing when we interact with an object or system we're gonna process uh this this the system through three levels uh that are gonna create some emotions so the first one is visceral that's the level that is very uh uh based on appearance it's it's like your gut feeling uh like the the term is is pretty self-explanatory it's visceral so it's how things look um bright colors for example or have things taste uh the look feels the sounds um this is really you just look at something it looks amazing uh if you're into cars you know there are the cars that like luke had like lines that are either aggressive or and they you really feel that they're they're powerful this is all about visceral

design and so that's really important in games as well of course and all about presentation art um direction but also uh game film and we're gonna talk about the infield a bit um in the next slide and so this is the first level of processing the next level is behavioral so it's how do we interact with that system uh so it's the pleasure and effectiveness of use so this time it's it's it's less about how it looks you know how beautiful it's not about the aesthetic it's about the functionality it's about am i able to accomplish the things that i want to accomplish and so in ux we call that usability we make sure that a system like a video game is going to be designed to uh to be used by a human so this is what we call human centered design and we make sure that it's usable so that we understand science and feedback and we understand how to use the the system we have form follows function

function comes first and we try to make sure that uh the functionality is conveyed through uh the the shape and sound of the element all of these things is uh about behavioral level and of course accessibility is in there and the last uh level is reflective so this is more about the self image that we get when we interact with uh with the system maybe we felt guilt or maybe we felt we are proud because we want so that's self-image uh personal satisfaction memories um so it's all about the meaning of of elements you know what it what it makes you uh think about you know it's uh uh if you think about uh uh star wars if uh you're in your 30s or 40s you know you have like that that memories are that are attached to it and it's it's more about you know the battle of of the good against evil uh more than a political movie so it's all about uh the the story the

narrative um the meaning what does it mean um to you so uh it's it's not now not about the functionality but it's about how you reflect um on this novelty is also a part of it you know you we like to have uh novel experiences and uh so we can uh reflect on these elements so this is the the baseline um the the three levels of process when we interact with anything so these all happen at the same time and this ver was very well described by don norman here i'm gonna show you how we use in game design in motion more specifically so there are two big notions in in game design um to tackle emotion the first one is what we call game fill so there's a book by steve swink that is very uh that describes very well what game feel is about um but basically it's how good it feels to interact with the game so there are three very important notions in here the

first one is what we call the three c's um and i'm going to describe that a bit later uh so it's a camera control character uh it's also about the sense of presence do i feel uh is there anything preventing me from feeling that i am inside um the game and the last one is the sense of physical reality is it is it believable when i don't know if there's a game there and you explode balloons do you have like a believable uh physical experience in there you know balloons popping you know like with a specific specific sound effect of vfx etc so to be more precise uh the three c's like i said it's as camera control characters um so camera is is gonna have a very big impact on how we feel about the game of course um so if you have a game that is god-like most most of the time you're gonna have a top-down or isometric view of the game because you feel that

you can control things and uh you're you're like managing all this world if you want a game that that more about the the thrill about being scared which is the visceral level like being scared about something like a roller coaster or horror movies as the visceral level um and to accomplish that we uh we gonna use a first person camera and sometimes most of the time we're gonna have a narrow field of view so it feels like you don't you don't see around and it's it's as much easier to jump scare people when we do that so the choice of camera is going to have a big impact on how the game feels uh and is of course very important it's one of the main elements that we need to to tackle in a game another very critical element is uh are the controls um you know how how the the players are going to be able to uh uh interact with the system and what are

the controls uh is it gonna be easy to to do or do you highlight like do to feel like an octopus to uh to accomplish some very uh common actions in the game um i'm showing here the controls from ea skate because it was a very interesting use of um control so eskate is the game about skating and um ins instead of using the the face buttons for uh the tricks they used uh the thumbstick um to uh the the idea was to try to recreate with your thumb the this sort of physical feeling that you would get while skating uh and so that was an interesting uh approach to um to control so the controls and how could they feel and if they feel natural or uh is it is it uh kind of weird it's not a uh it's not by chance that we have um that we shoot on on a console game with the triggers because

it feels like a trigger from um a real gun so and and it's and and you hold it and it's you have a good grip in your hand so controls are also very important to nail in your game and the last one is character so the main character is the avatar of the the player of course but all the characters in the game are going to be important and they need to convey some some emotions so of course we care a lot about who are these characters what do they transcend and uh sorry here's an example from hellblade and you have senua she's uh so she's the avatar she's she's the heron of the of the game and you see like for example there's an element from this um character model and she has that rat that is growing on her hand every time she dies and wow every time the plyo dies and then she uh experimented and in her world and so you see that thing growing on

a harm so on her on her arm so all these elements are really really important to uh have a good game feel and many big studios they are tackling you know camera controls characters first uh during their pre-production um so that they can nail that uh the best they can so that was for the three c's and then i told you about presence and physical reality so presence is do i feel present in the game and by by that i don't mean removing the hud um it's not by removing all the things that you necessarily gonna have a bigger sense of presence like imagine um uh if you drive a new car that you don't know it's not about removing uh the all the controls and and all the the dashboard is going to make you feel that you're on the road is uh when these controls and dashboard are not in the way and feels natural and you can just concentrate on the road it's the same thing with the video game you have the

controls and you have the interface and yeah you have um the the head but if when it's not in the way this is when you can feel that you have presence in the game so of course usability is really important to uh to nail that presence is also um do i feel that i'm part of the world so um if you look at a game where you have a crowd ai is the crowd reacting in a a a realistic way to what you're doing so for example an assassin's creed if you're doing like something weird or you're assassinating someone in the street and people see you if the crowd is is reacting to that it makes you feel present in the game um in 2d for example in a mobile game like clash of clans you want to build a new building and you feel that sense of presence because as you say yeah i want to build that you have the little characters that come over and they start building and so it makes you feel that you have a real presence into the world and the

the game world is reacting to you uh the narrative also also is really important for for presence uh the story you know can i make choices that are going to be meaningful for the story all that increases the same of presence um and music and and all that i can't cover it all but it's it's uh it's it's like pretty uh pretty important and physical reality is is it does it is it believable so i told you like if you pop balloons in the game do you feel that it is balloon is it doing like the pap sound that you would expect from balloons um do you have particle effects uh if you have a very strong character that is running towards you um you might have like a camera shake every time the character like as it runs and hit the foot hits the ground so all these elements are about physical reality it is not about photorealism again it's more about is it believable um in the game so here i'm going to show you an example from fortnite

uh again so it's old from the the closed alpha around the loot box uh why i'm showing you that because it's particularly the game feel uh on this is particularly well uh well done and um you can see that the loot box is not just a box it's not just a chest or a card pack that you would um open it is in the shape of a llama pinata so that's all about presence you know it's also about the narrative you know how does it fit uh the world it's also reacting out to you when you move the mouse around its eyes that they are following you and when you're about to hit it so you have like a uh it feels um you have that sense of physical reality and then you have um particle effects and all that so i'm gonna show you how it looks like um hopefully you'll have the sound it's a lovely day for loot [Music] have at it [Music]

oh i am feeling lucky hey check out this nice loot [Music] all right so you see you know that stuff happening and oh you get something cool you know it's changed in color and you have all this all this stuff happening so all of that is about game feel and it's really important to uh to polish it and again to increase the emotional connection that we have to it okay so that was about game feel and arguably we can talk about hours about that but i just want to move on so that you have a an overview about all the things that you can talk about um there's also the brain is pretty uh reactive to novelty um because anything new in our environment can potentially kill us so we have a tendency to to pay attention to raison awareness

when something is new uh and that can be potentially dangerous so that's the reason why we love novelty uh we love to have some surprises and and to discover things uh this is why learning is pleasurable most of the time and we can use that to uh sustain engagement so that players are not getting bored if you always do the same activity even though you like that activity at some point you know you your awareness is as decreasing because you know you don't really need to pay attention so that's the reason why um novelties discovery surprises curiosity all things that we can use to raise engagements and awareness so an example uh some examples of that um in zelda you have like they use they tease fliers a lot you have they they tease players curiosity so in this uh all the screenshots from a link to the past had you see the cracks in the wall and these are new cracks uh from this wall as it's a different wall

that that you've never seen before and suppliers see that for the first time like how that's that seems new and and how do i uh interact with that and this is how you learn that you need a super bomb to explode this uh this particular wall so through uh something a bit new uh it cannot be too new because then it can be very scary to have something looks completely new but we like to have some novelty and to have our curiosity um teased another example of uh that is uh uncharted 3 and uncharted 3 you have a section in the game where you're in a ship and the ship is sinking and as it sinks it's it's um rotating uh it's tilting at 90 degrees and all your controls are rotated 90 degrees as a result so it's creating some sort of some new surprise and that decide to gain feel so it's tied to controls and so for example if you try to move forward your character is actually uh moving left and that creates some some sort of uh of novelty so

it's it's good to do that once the player is already used uh to the controls so that it brings some sort of of novelty that is raising your awareness um another game does that limbo um does that you have a level where um it's a it's a side scrolling um um platforming puzzle game and at some point you have a level where your um the gravity is upside down so when you arrive in the several episodes so then the q you uh you get stuck to the ceiling so all these elements are something new that's happening in the game at some point when you're already used to the game so that's is raising awareness um another example more tied to to narrative um is on fortnite or on diablo you have this the mimics so you you think it's a chest and you you know you don't even pay attention you you just like hold to open it and surprise this is not a chest it is an

enemy in the string to destroy you so all these things is bring some novelty uh the problem with that is that you need to uh to make it novel uh quite often uh to to work and that's the reason why we either we need to uh always have new new elements in an online game um that is uh that is live so that players are not getting bored um so one of the way to do that is to create have new content so dlc or or new seasons or new characters or new maps uh multiplayer games can be more engaging in the long term because every time you play it can be with different players so it can bring something new or systemic procedurally generated games are can help with that because every time you play it's going to be a little bit different arguably it's it's taking a lot of time and it's also making the game workers crunch quite a bit so it does have its downside

for sure just here a few books if you want to dive more into the the topics emotional design from don norman gamefield from steve swink and how games move us from uh catherine is visitor and and again think about emotion um so in my framework i explained that emotion is here to support motivation and you and this is what you really need um to do to think about game feel and presence and surprises and how this can support player motivation in terms of competence autonomy and relatedness so for example if you have particle effects it's even more meaningful if it's because you just want something or you accomplished a goal and so you feel competent so the last um so yeah this is it for

this part so uh remember to use game fields phrases presence physical reality and novelty to sustain engagement and the last part i'm gonna go fast because i'm already uh um it's pretty late already so it's all about trying to manipulate emotions ethically there is no such thing as neutral design and the thing that we design is going to influence people to interact with it in a certain way um for example if you have a handle on a door this is influencing you to grab the handle and and pull so sometimes these doors need to be pushed and that's a bit annoying so it manipulated you into a wrong behavioral response so it's not the end of the world but everything that we create everything that we design is going to have an impact on people's expectations and behavior and art of course is about manipulating emotion so we need to understand that nothing we

do is going to be neutral and we need to ensure that this is not going to have a negative impact on our players um of course so i told you that we need emotion to uh to think rational to accomplish our goals and to to be able to reason the problem is and emotions can trick us of course um so here are just a few examples that have been studied by behavioral economics you have the example of scarcity when something is uh getting scarce like we we had that a few countries at that where um because of the pandemic all of a sudden they're uh we're a scarcity and toilet paper and so when's their scarcity even though you you know you don't care that much about toilet paper now we want it because we might not have it and so scarcity works a lot with the fear of missing out the fomo um because we know that maybe maybe it's going to be gone before i get there so anytime you see sales this is the um uh the the fear of

missing out is used like you know it's ending tonight or so like you have to be there you have only like one more day to benefit all of these uh awesome discounts thus version we are very averse to loss more than uh we like games and so anytime we feel that players are going to lose something we play on lots of versions so the example would be streaks when like in snapchat you have the snipes trick and like every day you interact with a certain person you uh it's going up and up and up and if one day you don't interact with that person it's going all the way back down and this plays on lots of version so we don't want to lose all that awesome streak and so that's encouraging us to keep interacting with the system even though we didn't really want to do it that day and the last one of my examples there's many many more it's anchoring affect we also see that in in sales and like when you see the the original price and you have straight through on it and you see the the new price the discounted price um we have a tendency to base our

decision on on on an anchor on uh we compare things and this can uh persuade us to buy something that we did not really want um so this is all the things when emotions trick us and has been used in tech and in marketing and and and many uh situations for um as for a long long long long time um the thing is uh we have to be careful uh and see how it can impact negatively our players when we do ux we think about humans first and not the business first of course we need to make sure that the the game is going to be sustainable but we don't want to trick players because this is not what we do here is an example of a one of these emotional uh trick that sometimes people use i'm gonna use the example of amazon because uh they're uh they're pretty famous infamous for that um so for example like here they i use

the lots of version like oh you don't want to subscribe for amazon prime and therefore you're ready to they don't use the term lose which is making it a bit better um but so oh yeah you agree to not to not um save uh some money and so it's also uh implying that you're a bit dumb so it's playing on your on your emotion so of course uh we're going to have that in video games because again an art form is going to manipulate emotion by definition but we need to be careful at what is it we're manipulating and if we're using some um some some of these emotional tricks not to um to serve gameplay or not to increase the the experience for the players but to increase our business goals or to make players come back or to make them spend more so i'm not saying that it's an easy way to define where's the line uh like the crops dying or the tamaguchi it's difficult to have that experience of that these sort of games without um that that

last version of feeling um because things are decaying if you're not here so i'm not saying that it's very easy to define where the line is but we certainly need to um to think about it that way so we can understand what impact we have on our place especially when we are targeting kids or we know that our game is played by uh kids because kids uh don't have a mature preferable cortex so i don't know if you remember the one of the first slides i showed you this limbic system and it's interacting with the frontal lobe and more specifically the prefrontal cortex this is the part of the brain that is uh uh avoiding automatic um behavior and sometimes this is when we stop and think uh instead of falling for the trap or falling you know for loss of version we're going to stop and think and that's thanks to the prefrontal cortex the problem is uh the limbic system develops way faster than the prefrontal cortex and the prefrontal cortex is maturing

around um completely around 23 to 25 years old that's not to say that teenagers are completely lost before that but it is harder for young children and even teenagers to resist some of these tricks so we definitely need to be careful more so than we are when we're addressing adults so i'm going to leave you with that you know um if you have a game that is rated t or e make sure to avoid all these tricks and reconsider uh them in all the games so guilt tripping loss aversion if you're missing out loot box tied to monetization because it's using conditioning etc etc so manipulate emotions ethically emotions are going to be manipulated in an art form it is normal and it's good it's we we want that but we need to consider the ethics of the manipulation in our art form

so this is the reason why you can take a look at ethicalgames.org which is an initiative that we just kicked off and we have a panel at ggc summer on thursday at uh 10 am if you're interested into that topic all right i talked too much so i'm just right uh on time but i don't think we're gonna have enough time for questions uh but you have you see here the books that i uh wrote and you can poke me on twitter and you'll find some resources on my blog and let me know emma if we have time for maybe one or two questions or if uh i should take it offline and answer questions on twitter or on chat